OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Auto Completion of User Interface Layout Design Using Transformer-Based Tree Decoders
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2020
Year: 2020

It has been of increasing interest in the field to develop automatic machineries to facilitate the design process. In this paper, we focus on assisting graphical user interface (UI) layout design, a crucial task in app development. Given a partial layout, which a designer has entered, our model learns to complete the layout by predicting the remaining UI elements with a correct position and dimension as well as the hierarchical structures. Such automation will significantly ease the effort of UI designers and developers. While we focus on interface layout prediction, our model can be generally applicable for other layout prediction problems that involve tree structures and 2-dimensional placements. Particularly, we design two versions of Transformer-based tree decoders: Pointer and Recursive Transformer, and experiment with these models on a public dataset. We also propose several metrics for measuring the accuracy of tree prediction and ground these metrics in the domain of user experience. These contribute a new task and methods to deep learning research.
A BERT based Sentiment Analysis and Key Entity Detection Approach for Online Financial Texts
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

The emergence and rapid progress of the Internet have brought ever-increasing impact on financial domain. How to rapidly and accurately mine the key information from the massive negative financial texts has become one of the key issues for investors and decision makers. Aiming at the issue, we propose a sentiment analysis and key entity detection approach based on BERT, which is applied in online financial text mining and public opinion analysis in social media. By using pre-train model, we first study sentiment analysis, and then we consider key entity detection as a sentence matching or Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) task in different granularity. Among them, we mainly focus on negative sentimental information. We detect the specific entity by using our approach, which is different from traditional Named Entity Recognition (NER). In addition, we also use ensemble learning to improve the performance of proposed approach. Experimental results show that the performance of our approach is generally higher than SVM, LR, NBM, and BERT for two financial sentiment analysis and key entity detection datasets.
Secrecy and Accessibility in Distributed Storage
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

A distributed storage system (DSS) needs to be efficiently accessible and repairable. Recently, considerable effort has been made towards the latter, while the former is usually not considered, since a trivial solution exists in the form of systematic encoding. However, this is not a viable option when considering storage that has to be secure against eavesdroppers. This work investigates the problem of efficient access to data stored on an DSS under such security constraints. Further, we establish methods to balance the access load, i.e., ensure that each node is accessed equally often. We establish the capacity for the alphabet independent case and give an explicit code construction. For the alphabet-dependent case we give existence results based on a random coding argument.
A Supervised Learning Algorithm for Multilayer Spiking Neural Networks Based on Temporal Coding Toward Energy-Efficient VLSI Processor Design
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2020
Year: 2020

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are brain-inspired mathematical models with the ability to process information in the form of spikes. SNNs are expected to provide not only new machine-learning algorithms, but also energy-efficient computational models when implemented in VLSI circuits. In this paper, we propose a novel supervised learning algorithm for SNNs based on temporal coding. A spiking neuron in this algorithm is designed to facilitate analog VLSI implementations with analog resistive memory, by which ultra-high energy efficiency can be achieved. We also propose several techniques to improve the performance on a recognition task, and show that the classification accuracy of the proposed algorithm is as high as that of the state-of-the-art temporal coding SNN algorithms on the MNIST dataset. Finally, we discuss the robustness of the proposed SNNs against variations that arise from the device manufacturing process and are unavoidable in analog VLSI implementation. We also propose a technique to suppress the effects of variations in the manufacturing process on the recognition performance.
Multi-level trust-based intelligence schema for securing of internet of things (IoT) against security threats using cryptographic authentication
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

The internet of things (IoT) is able to provide a prediction of linked, universal, and smart nodes that have autonomous interaction when they present services. Because of wide openness, relatively high processing power, and wide distribution of IoT things, they are ideal for attacks of the gray hole. In the gray hole attack, the attacker fakes itself as the shortest path to the destination that is a thing here. This causes the routing packets not to reach the destination. The proposed method is based on the AODV routing protocol and is presented under the MTISS-IoT name which means for the reduction of gray hole attacks using check node information. In this paper, a hybrid approach is proposed based on cryptographic authentication. The proposed approach consists of four phases, such as the verifying node trust in the IoT, testing the routes, gray hole attack discovery, and the malicious attack elimination process in MTISS-IoT. The method is evaluated here via extensive simulations carried out in the NS-3 environment. The experimental results of four scenarios demonstrated that the MTISS-IoT method can achieve a false positive rate of 14.104%, a false negative rate of 17.49%, and a detection rate of 94.5% when gray hole attack was launched.
A Method for Estimating Reflectance map and Material using Deep Learning with Synthetic Dataset
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

The process of decomposing target images into their internal properties is a difficult task due to the inherent ill-posed nature of the problem. The lack of data required to train a network is a one of the reasons why the decomposing appearance task is difficult. In this paper, we propose a deep learning-based reflectance map prediction system for material estimation of target objects in the image, so as to alleviate the ill-posed problem that occurs in this image decomposition operation. We also propose a network architecture for Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function (BRDF) parameter estimation, environment map estimation. We also use synthetic data to solve the lack of data problems. We get out of the previously proposed Deep Learning-based network architecture for reflectance map, and we newly propose to use conditional Generative Adversarial Network (cGAN) structures for estimating the reflectance map, which enables better results in many applications. To improve the efficiency of learning in this structure, we newly utilized the loss function using the normal map of the target object.
3D Object Segmentation for Shelf Bin Picking by Humanoid with Deep Learning and Occupancy Voxel Grid Map
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

Picking objects in a narrow space such as shelf bins is an important task for humanoid to extract target object from environment. In those situations, however, there are many occlusions between the camera and objects, and this makes it difficult to segment the target object three dimensionally because of the lack of three dimentional sensor inputs. We address this problem with accumulating segmentation result with multiple camera angles, and generating voxel model of the target object. Our approach consists of two components: first is object probability prediction for input image with convolutional networks, and second is generating voxel grid map which is designed for object segmentation. We evaluated the method with the picking task experiment for target objects in narrow shelf bins. Our method generates dense 3D object segments even with occlusions, and the real robot successfuly picked target objects from the narrow space.
Scout: Rapid Exploration of Interface Layout Alternatives through High-Level Design Constraints
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2020
Year: 2020

Although exploring alternatives is fundamental to creating better interface designs, current processes for creating alternatives are generally manual, limiting the alternatives a designer can explore. We present Scout, a system that helps designers rapidly explore alternatives through mixed-initiative interaction with high-level constraints and design feedback. Prior constraint-based layout systems use low-level spatial constraints and generally produce a single design. Tosupport designer exploration of alternatives, Scout introduces high-level constraints based on design concepts (e.g.,~semantic structure, emphasis, order) and formalizes them into low-level spatial constraints that a solver uses to generate potential layouts. In an evaluation with 18 interface designers, we found that Scout: (1) helps designers create more spatially diverse layouts with similar quality to those created with a baseline tool and (2) can help designers avoid a linear design process and quickly ideate layouts they do not believe they would have thought of on their own.
Survey on STT-MRAM Testing: Failure Mechanisms, Fault Models, and Tests
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2020
Year: 2020

As one of the most promising emerging non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies, spin-transfer torque magnetic random access memory (STT-MRAM) has attracted significant research attention due to several features such as high density, zero standby leakage, and nearly unlimited endurance. However, a high-quality test solution is required prior to the commercialization of STT-MRAM. In this paper, we present all STT-MRAM failure mechanisms: manufacturing defects, extreme process variations, magnetic coupling, STT-switching stochasticity, and thermal fluctuation. The resultant fault models including permanent faults and transient faults are classified and discussed. Moreover, the limited test algorithms and design-for-testability (DfT) designs proposed in the literature are also covered. It is clear that test solutions for STT-MRAMs are far from well established yet, especially when considering a defective part per billion (DPPB) level requirement. We present the main challenges on the STT-MRAM testing topic at three levels: failure mechanisms, fault modeling, and test/DfT designs.
Fundamental Limits of Age-of-Information in Stationary and Non-stationary Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

We study the multi-user scheduling problem for minimizing the Age of Information (AoI) in cellular wireless networks under stationary and non-stationary regimes. We derive fundamental lower bounds for the scheduling problem and design efficient online policies with provable performance guarantees. In the stationary setting, we consider the AoI optimization problem for a set of mobile users travelling around multiple cells. In this setting, we propose a scheduling policy and show that it is $2$-optimal. Next, we propose a new adversarial channel model for studying the scheduling problem in non-stationary environments. For $N$ users, we show that the competitive ratio of any online scheduling policy in this setting is at least $Ω(N)$. We then propose an online policy and show that it achieves a competitive ratio of $O(N^2)$. Finally, we introduce a relaxed adversarial model with channel state estimations for the immediate future. We propose a heuristic model predictive control policy that exploits this feature and compare its performance through numerical simulations.
Stereotypical Bias Removal for Hate Speech Detection Task using Knowledge-based Generalizations
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

With the ever-increasing cases of hate spread on social media platforms, it is critical to design abuse detection mechanisms to proactively avoid and control such incidents. While there exist methods for hate speech detection, they stereotype words and hence suffer from inherently biased training. Bias removal has been traditionally studied for structured datasets, but we aim at bias mitigation from unstructured text data. In this paper, we make two important contributions. First, we systematically design methods to quantify the bias for any model and propose algorithms for identifying the set of words which the model stereotypes. Second, we propose novel methods leveraging knowledge-based generalizations for bias-free learning. Knowledge-based generalization provides an effective way to encode knowledge because the abstraction they provide not only generalizes content but also facilitates retraction of information from the hate speech detection classifier, thereby reducing the imbalance. We experiment with multiple knowledge generalization policies and analyze their effect on general performance and in mitigating bias. Our experiments with two real-world datasets, a Wikipedia Talk Pages dataset (WikiDetox) of size ~96k and a Twitter dataset of size ~24k, show that the use of knowledge-based generalizations results in better performance by forcing the classifier to learn from generalized content. Our methods utilize existing knowledge-bases and can easily be extended to other tasks
Noise-tolerant, Reliable Active Classification with Comparison Queries
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

With the explosion of massive, widely available unlabeled data in the past years, finding label and time efficient, robust learning algorithms has become ever more important in theory and in practice. We study the paradigm of active learning, in which algorithms with access to large pools of data may adaptively choose what samples to label in the hope of exponentially increasing efficiency. By introducing comparisons, an additional type of query comparing two points, we provide the first time and query efficient algorithms for learning non-homogeneous linear separators robust to bounded (Massart) noise. We further provide algorithms for a generalization of the popular Tsybakov low noise condition, and show how comparisons provide a strong reliability guarantee that is often impractical or impossible with only labels - returning a classifier that makes no errors with high probability.
Newtonian Monte Carlo: single-site MCMC meets second-order gradient methods
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Single-site Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a variant of MCMC in which a single coordinate in the state space is modified in each step. Structured relational models are a good candidate for this style of inference. In the single-site context, second order methods become feasible because the typical cubic costs associated with these methods is now restricted to the dimension of each coordinate. Our work, which we call Newtonian Monte Carlo (NMC), is a method to improve MCMC convergence by analyzing the first and second order gradients of the target density to determine a suitable proposal density at each point. Existing first order gradient-based methods suffer from the problem of determining an appropriate step size. Too small a step size and it will take a large number of steps to converge, while a very large step size will cause it to overshoot the high density region. NMC is similar to the Newton-Raphson update in optimization where the second order gradient is used to automatically scale the step size in each dimension. However, our objective is to find a parameterized proposal density rather than the maxima. As a further improvement on existing first and second order methods, we show that random variables with constrained supports don't need to be transformed before taking a gradient step. We demonstrate the efficiency of NMC on a number of different domains. For statistical models where the prior is conjugate to the likelihood, our method recovers the posterior quite trivially in one step. However, we also show results on fairly large non-conjugate models, where NMC performs better than adaptive first order methods such as NUTS or other inexact scalable inference methods such as Stochastic Variational Inference or bootstrapping.
The Error Probability of Maximum-Likelihood Decoding over Two Deletion Channels
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

This paper studies the problem of reconstructing a word given several of its noisy copies. This setup is motivated by several applications, among them is reconstructing strands in DNA-based storage systems. Under this paradigm, a word is transmitted over some fixed number of identical independent channels and the goal of the decoder is to output the transmitted word or some close approximation. The main focus of this paper is the case of two deletion channels and studying the error probability of the maximum-likelihood (ML) decoder under this setup. First, it is discussed how the ML decoder operates. Then, we observe that the dominant error patterns are deletions in the same run or errors resulting from alternating sequences. Based on these observations, it is derived that the error probability of the ML decoder is roughly $\frac{3q-1}{q-1}p^2$, when the transmitted word is any $q$-ary sequence and $p$ is the channel's deletion probability. We also study the cases when the transmitted word belongs to the Varshamov Tenengolts (VT) code or the shifted VT code. Lastly, the insertion channel is studied as well. These theoretical results are verified by corresponding simulations.
PDANet: Pyramid Density-aware Attention Net for Accurate Crowd Counting
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Crowd counting, i.e., estimating the number of people in a crowded area, has attracted much interest in the research community. Although many attempts have been reported, crowd counting remains an open real-world problem due to the vast scale variations in crowd density within the interested area, and severe occlusion among the crowd. In this paper, we propose a novel Pyramid Density-Aware Attention-based network, abbreviated as PDANet, that leverages the attention, pyramid scale feature and two branch decoder modules for density-aware crowd counting. The PDANet utilizes these modules to extract different scale features, focus on the relevant information, and suppress the misleading ones. We also address the variation of crowdedness levels among different images with an exclusive Density-Aware Decoder (DAD). For this purpose, a classifier evaluates the density level of the input features and then passes them to the corresponding high and low crowded DAD modules. Finally, we generate an overall density map by considering the summation of low and high crowded density maps as spatial attention. Meanwhile, we employ two losses to create a precise density map for the input scene. Extensive evaluations conducted on the challenging benchmark datasets well demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed PDANet in terms of the accuracy of counting and generated density maps over the well-known state of the arts.
Attack based DoS attack detection using multiple classifier
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2020
Year: 2020

One of the most common internet attacks causing significant economic losses in recent years is the Denial of Service (DoS) flooding attack. As a countermeasure, intrusion detection systems equipped with machine learning classification algorithms were developed to detect anomalies in network traffic. These classification algorithms had varying degrees of success, depending on the type of DoS attack used. In this paper, we use an SNMP-MIB dataset from real testbed to explore the most prominent DoS attacks and the chances of their detection based on the classification algorithm used. The results show that most DOS attacks used nowadays can be detected with high accuracy using machine learning classification techniques based on features provided by SNMP-MIB. We also conclude that of all the attacks we studied, the Slowloris attack had the highest detection rate, on the other hand TCP-SYN had the lowest detection rate throughout all classification techniques, despite being one of the most used DoS attacks.
Document Network Projection in Pretrained Word Embedding Space
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2020
Year: 2020

We present Regularized Linear Embedding (RLE), a novel method that projects a collection of linked documents (e.g. citation network) into a pretrained word embedding space. In addition to the textual content, we leverage a matrix of pairwise similarities providing complementary information (e.g., the network proximity of two documents in a citation graph). We first build a simple word vector average for each document, and we use the similarities to alter this average representation. The document representations can help to solve many information retrieval tasks, such as recommendation, classification and clustering. We demonstrate that our approach outperforms or matches existing document network embedding methods on node classification and link prediction tasks. Furthermore, we show that it helps identifying relevant keywords to describe document classes.
On Schedulability Analysis of EDF Scheduling by Considering Suspension as Blocking
Venue: arXiv cs.OS 2020
Year: 2020

During the execution of a job, it may suspend itself, i.e., its computation ceases to process until certain activities are complete to be resumed. This paper provides a counterexample of the schedulability analysis by Devi in Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS) in 2003, which is the only existing suspension-aware analysis specialized for uniprocessor systems when preemptive earliest-deadline-first (EDF) is applied for scheduling dynamic selfsuspending tasks.
Probabilistic 3D Multilabel Real-time Mapping for Multi-object Manipulation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

Probabilistic 3D map has been applied to object segmentation with multiple camera viewpoints, however, conventional methods lack of real-time efficiency and functionality of multilabel object mapping. In this paper, we propose a method to generate three-dimensional map with multilabel occupancy in real-time. Extending our previous work in which only target label occupancy is mapped, we achieve multilabel object segmentation in a single looking around action. We evaluate our method by testing segmentation accuracy with 39 different objects, and applying it to a manipulation task of multiple objects in the experiments. Our mapping-based method outperforms the conventional projection-based method by 40 - 96\% relative (12.6 mean $IU_{3d}$), and robot successfully recognizes (86.9\%) and manipulates multiple objects (60.7\%) in an environment with heavy occlusions.
ScaIL: Classifier Weights Scaling for Class Incremental Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Incremental learning is useful if an AI agent needs to integrate data from a stream. The problem is non trivial if the agent runs on a limited computational budget and has a bounded memory of past data. In a deep learning approach, the constant computational budget requires the use of a fixed architecture for all incremental states. The bounded memory generates data imbalance in favor of new classes and a prediction bias toward them appears. This bias is commonly countered by introducing a data balancing step in addition to the basic network training. We depart from this approach and propose simple but efficient scaling of past class classifier weights to make them more comparable to those of new classes. Scaling exploits incremental state level statistics and is applied to the classifiers learned in the initial state of classes in order to profit from all their available data. We also question the utility of the widely used distillation loss component of incremental learning algorithms by comparing it to vanilla fine tuning in presence of a bounded memory. Evaluation is done against competitive baselines using four public datasets. Results show that the classifier weights scaling and the removal of the distillation are both beneficial.